Posted
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Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @11:37AM
from the mark-shuttleworth-becomes-filthy-rich dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Windows 7 was expected to have Service Pack 2 issued roughly 3 years from its introduction (late 2009). People, including myself, have been asking 'Where is it?' and the answer apparently is, 'It isn't, and will never be' which lends itself to the giant pain of installing Windows 7, then Service Pack 1, and hundreds of smaller hotfix patches. Why Microsoft? No go to Service Pack 2 for Windows 7!"

The make more money is probably not in more OS sales. It is more likely that moving people onto Win8 means people are more likely to purchase software through Microsoft's Store where they get a cut. That is way more money. It also explains why Win8 is so cheap - they're trying to move people into their Store (and get that cut of *all* the action as Apple does).

They are charging something like $40 for a Xp, Vista,Win7 upgrade to Win 8 Pro. I think they are going the way of Apple, ~$30-40 upgrades every couple years. People are probably more likely to go "oh a little bit of eye candy, okay here's my $40" than a $200 complete generational shift every 5 years and having the whole "Will I still want to use this computer for a long enough timeframe to make it worth it?" kind of discussion. Cheaper than a dinner and movie for one yep why not. Heck I'd pay the $40 to be sure to not have any malware (that doesn't come in the "box";)), licensing issues in the future and save me the 20 min spent looking for a good rip and crack code.

Except that price is only good until Jan 17th just as it was with Win 7, then it'll be right back to the $200. You see THIS is the bitch, you have MSFT trying to charge like its only putting out one and a half every decade but crank them out every 3 years, and its gonna fucking bomb HARD. if they had any sense they'd be selling features and offering the appstore to Win 7 for free, instead like the media cartels they are gonna try to hang onto the old business practices while trying to glom on to the next wave, retarded.

Be careful when you highlight the high cost of Windows. They charge a lot more than Apple, but you get a lot more:

Average support lifecycle for recent Apple OS releases (bugfixes and security patches): 2-3 years. The latest OS to be abandoned is Leopard (after 2 years). Snow Leopard is expected to be abandoned soon (it's in Extended Support now), and Apple has made no commitment to how long they will continue to support it.

When you pay more for the Microsoft OS, you get a commitment to long support lifecycles, AND you know exactly how long your OS will be supported:

Mainstream Windows 7 Support (bugfixes + security fixes) = until 2015

Extended Windows 7 Support (security fixes) = until 2020.

So what Microsoft is giving you here is a CHOICE - you can choose to use your Windows install for a decade after release, and have no fear of your system being exploited by an unpatched vulnerability. In the Apple world your only "choice" is to keep upgrading, and that's not much help if your hardware is suddenly unsupported.

So, in this perspective the $200 cost of a full-on Windows 8 license is a pretty good deal (and if you want less freedom you can always buy the OEM version for $100). And for the big picture the $40 upgrade price is an absolute STEAL: for your $40 you will get bug fixes until 2018 and exploit fixes until 2023 (by that time even Mountain Lion will be long-since forgotten).

Hell they could have added the appstore as a gadget and in the start menu and gotten many people on board, instead by being retarded and tying the thing to a whole new OS as you said they'll have to wait until the next hardware refresh and the business users look like they are gonna hang onto Win 7 like they did XP so they won't be getting them until 2019.

I have NEVER seen a company fracture their user base so badly before. At least Google has an excuse as 2.2 is so low on system reqs a lot of the cheap s

From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.

Aero is the desktop composition engine that uses the GPU to do all kinds of rendering shit. This is present in 8 and in fact faster/more capable than ever. Glass (Aero Glass) is the shiny UI in Windows 7, that is gone in Windows 8, replaced with an uglied up flat, square, UI.

So basically there is an even better desktop composition engine, that is used to composite something that looks like Windows 3.1:).

In terms of drivers, yes older drivers seem quite compatible. My pro sound card works no problems with the 7 drivers and pro audio cards have some of the most finicky drivers out there.

JUST FYI to all those out there who don't know THE FASTER IS A LIE, its a bad hack they bolted on that will cause more problems than they fix. Look up "Win 8 Hybrid boot" to see what I mean their "speed boost" is nothing but a hacked together hybrid of hibernate and sleep that keeps the OS state no matter how you shut down so clean reboots are a thing of the past, in fact you'll have to drop down to CLI and turn the damned thing off to force a clean boot on Windows 8...just stupid.

This!
The most disturbing thing you could do it’s stuffing a touch-oriented UI in a desktop rig. At least Apple has iOS for mobile (touch-oriented) devices, and OS X for desktops and laptops. Not the biggest fruit fan, but the example came to the conversation.

Is it not true?
after XP it took almost 6yrs to come out with a new OS. Now, there will be 3 new OSes in 6yrs.
It is indeed true that MS is out to remake all the money they lost from leaving XP on the carpet and letting it soak in.
So many people have XP now that MS is encouraging other companies to stop supporting it as to force people to upgrade.

There were two reasons for a huge vista delay: Longhorn was a clusterf*ck and the security debocle. They pretty much abandoned the revolutionary longhorn, and focused on cleaning up their code base. Not a bad choice, I just wish they would have cleaned it up in a more revolutionary way. ( in other words, kill win32 and start fresh). WinRT is just lipstick on the pig of win32.

When I wanted to test the developer preview of Win8, my only available computer was a single core Celeron from 2006 with 2Gig of RAM. It ran surprisingly well. For all the things that I disliked about Windows 8, the speed of the OS was not one of them.

Your Windows 7 machine will cope alright with 8. But I think that if you are happy with Windows 7 then you might as well stay with that. (Although being a $40 upgrade, I suppose that it is not a major investment to try the new user interface)

Windows 8 64 bit runs faster on my aging AMD Athlon64 X2 dual core 5400+ with 2 GB RAM than Windows 7 does. Been running the RTM version for a couple months now, and since I just got a legit Windows 8 Pro key from my work's MSDN account, I plan on getting rid of my Windows 7 install. Didn't use the Start Menu much, so I don't really miss it - you can replicate most of the functionality of it by putting some icons and shortcuts on your desktop. You can install several free apps to log directly into the de

It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.

It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.

Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.

And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.

There are no reinstall discs. There is a recovery partition and something called "internet recovery". If you use internet recovery, it just downloads the current version of the OS and installs it. No further updates required.

What would be a nice thing would be something that would be a combination of the two:

You boot a USB flash drive [1] which can get on the Internet and download signed updates to the OS. It then makes a temporary directory and slipstreams the updated packages in (perhaps keeping that directory on the USB media for faster subsequent reinstalls.)

Result -- one has an up to date install of the OS, but without having to transfer the bulk of it through an Internet connection, a lot of them being metered and expensive for bandwidth.

[1]: Ideally a USB flash drive which could take the updated partitions and slipstreamed directory, copy them to a directory, then mark it read-only so malware cannot tamper with the drive in the future.

Hell, if they just had an option that automatically does something like check for updates, download and install all available updates, reboot, repeat until there are no more updates that would be a huge improvement. That way I could just start it and let it do its thing overnight and I wouldn't have to babysit the damn thing for hours.

It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.

Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.

And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.

Problem being that Windows Update is a complete retard. I recently had to install Windows 7 from a DVD and when I first installed it I had to run windows update and I had to go through like one or two cycles up updates before it wanted to push service pack 1 to me, then there was like 10 rounds of downloading, installing and rebooting after the SP had been installed.

Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.

. . . and contrary to the claim of some, both Windows and Windows Server still require many reboots while doing this, unless you streamline them into the install - which in itself is a major pain in the ass when it's hundreds of individual updates. APUP (autopatcher) is a partial solution but it stagnated for a long while and I'm not sure I trust it on production systems now.

When some patches need to update in-use files, the patcher has no good way to identify that those files are already patched (because they're waiting as temporary files to be renamed over an in-use file).

If Windows had Unix file semantics, the updater could just do the renaming. The next patch along will then see the new contents, while whatever is keeping the file in-use will keep seeing the old contents. Thus it would be fairly trivial to just apply all the patches in sequence and reboot at the end.

Note that e.g. rpm/dpkg cannot work sensibly on a Windows system due to these awkward file semantics. Mandatory locks were introduced to Unix a long time ago, but happily practically no software uses them and you can safely just keep them turned off. In Windows they are used by practically everything (every executable locks its binary when executing).

A workaround is to have a standard placement and naming convention for patched in-use files. That way the next update could check that location first, before checking if the real destination is locked. Locking would be fun of course, and third-party updates better learn about that convention too.

Hmm, traditionally the only places people describe workarounds for Windows misfeatures is in patent documents. Perhaps I am missing an opportunity. It cannot be obvious, because Microsoft surely has a whole team working on Windows Update with at least one member counting as a person of ordinary skill in the art, and they did not seem to think of this fantastic idea.

Let old Hairy fix that problem right up...blam! [wsusoffline.net] there ya go, no charge. hell I'll even be nice and take care of the third party stuff most folks want...slam! [ninite.com]. Just use these two and go make you a sammich while they run, totally unattended, no muss, no fuss, and with WSUS Offline you can even have it apply the updates for MS Office and.NET while its at it. I keep WSUS on a network drive at the shop, it has every SP and update for every version of Windows from XP - Win 7 X64, while I'm installing the OS I just tell WSUS to drop the latest patches and SP along with.NET into a folder labeled for that OS and its ready to run by the time I hear the Windows chime, couldn't be simpler. you can even have it put the updates onto a thumbstick or DVD if you need to do it somewhere where else, easy peasy friend.

Service Packs also include hotfixes that don't appear on Windows Update. You have to request them from Microsoft if you have that specific issue. One notable hotfix that dogged XP users was the UAA patch that enabled HD Audio sound cards to work. It wasn't available for download from Microsoft, you had to get it from the vendor who made the hardware.... it was later made part of XP SP3.

I know this was something they were working to reduce, given the frustrations of multiple sequential reboots associated with small patches. The nice thing about a service pack is that (presumably) it would involve a single reboot at the end to complete the installation.

They aren't cutting support for Windows 7; they're just not aggregating updates into a single download. There hasn't been a Service Pack for Windows XP in 4 years, but the OS is still supported and will be for another two years. Service Packs are a relic from an age where the internet was not as pervasive, windows update was in its infancy, and it was easier to install a single offline update. Now, everyone is connected to the internet, and the difference between installing 80 updates online and a single se

Microsoft jumps on the bandwagon and follows Google and Mozilla in downplaying software versions. I bet they will be releasing new Windows often, very often... until people stop paying attentions to incremental differences and distinction between web-based services and locally run software is lost - which is already happening.

No, just seems like they are trying to phase out older OSes faster and raise their stock price FTFY.

God what I wouldn't give to be locked in a room for an hour with Steve Ballmer, as I would give him the lecture from hell.

WTF are you doing man? The trend is for PCs to last LONGER, yet you are trying to make your fucking money by sending the clock back to 1993? WHAT THE FUCK? God a fucking chimp could make money with Windows, and you are pissing it away? Sell fucking features you retard! I shouldn't need to

To be honest, NT4, 2000, and XP *NEEDED* all those service packs. This was before the great Security turnaround in 2003 that delayed the release of WIndows Server 2003, and resulted in the massive XP SP2 release.

Since then, Windows has had far less need of service pack because the code tends to be more solid.

SP1 is almost always a necessity though. The initial release of the OS tends to have enough niggly bugs that get fixed in SP1. I would argue that Vista SP2 was not really a service pack, but rather just a hotfix rollup. There were no new features introduced in SP2 (as it should be).

7 was pretty damn solid out of the gate though, still 7 SP1 had almost 1000 hotfixes and security patches (though a good portion of them related to specifically server functionality).

Windows 7 and Windows 8 have been pretty solid out of the gate. I don't see why MS wouldn't supply hotfix rollups for 7, but does it really need SP2? Only those people that want MS to provide Windows 8 features on 7 think so.

Yet MS still faces the challenge of all the businesses who are still using Win XP. My employer has tens of thousands of systems running XP, and is just now trickling out Win 7 systems. It would take a year of hard work to internally certify Win 8 -- and for what benefit? Prematurely killing off Win 7 could be a horrendous mistake.

Engineering wants to cut support for older products because they had to make compromises, hacks or were compelled to ship before it was ready to meet a deadline. As a result a product is released is difficult to maintain and they want to scrap it and focus on the next product that hasn't yet been ruined by marketing and product management. Naively they assume that they'll actually be able to do a proper job THIS time by getting ahead of the ball, until the deadline approaches, then the cycle repeats. This p

Hmmm. Not in my experience. Engineering is given a specification for a product. They respond with what they think is a project plan with all uncertainties accounted for. Building a flux capacitor (or whatever tricky widget) that they thought would be a 2 week process becomes 8 months. They start backpedaling on their commitment, and finally product management accedes to their "reduced" spec (note: engineers these days seem to love tossing the term Minimum Viable Product around. It doesn't mean a minimally functional product done quickly), and the product is launched. Engineering can be counted on 2 or three cycles of fixes (bugs, fixing production glitches in manufacturing, whatever) then they move on to the next big thing, and can't wait to tell support/mfg engineering that it is their problem.

Of course, senior management often gets in the middle of this and applies pressure through both the marketing/product management organization and the engineering management.

I would not expect that to happen. Microsoft hasn't managed to be a persistent parasite on the technology world by being that incredibly stupid. They're just stupid enough for most of the planet to hate them and very nearly cause even the government of the United States to break them up, but not quite stupid enough to destroy themselves. Win8 is going to launch, it will be our favorite joke for a few years, then Win9 (which will no doubt have to be rebranded to avoid the stigma of Win8) will be released wit

Haven't figured out how the game is played yet? Nobody was allowed to buy XP when Vista was out, what they bought was "Vista with downgrade rights" that way the Balmminator could claim "Look at how many Vista copies we sold!" while everyone just shitcanned the Vista DVD and stuck with XP.

Its just a retarded marketing numbers game that Forbes worst CEO likes to play, it makes him feel all warm and fuzzy and gives him lots of bullshit numbers he can wave around while everybody else knows the score. Bullshit

How about people that set up many PCs daily or weekly? Sure, home users aren't overtly affected by it but businesses are. Even automating it (IE: WSUS) still makes it a pain in the ass. "You would have had your new PC yesterday, but it's still updating Windows"

How about people that set up many PCs daily or weekly? Sure, home users aren't overtly affected by it but businesses are. Even automating it (IE: WSUS) still makes it a pain in the ass. "You would have had your new PC yesterday, but it's still updating Windows"

Anyone that installs multiple PCs and doesn't have a slipstream version deserves their punishment.

The horror of having your computer OS updated automagically in the dead of night while you sleep. I don't know how people have lived with it this long.

What about people like me who like to turn off their computer while they sleep to conserve power? My computer likes to download updates and request a reboot while I'm in the middle of something important.

This is disappointing, but not surprising. Microsoft knows that most experienced Windows users don't want any part of Windows 8. But they are convinced that Windows 8 is a vital part of their business strategy going forward. So they are doing whatever they can to bribe, force, or coerce users to switch to Windows 8. They don't want Windows 7 to become the new XP, even though they profited handsomely for many years from XP licenses. The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.

I _AM_ thinking about jumping off the windows train over Windows 8. I am on win7 now and will not go to win8. Every video I have seen of win8 leads me to believe I am going to have to re-learn the UI and OS operations again. If I have to do that why not try a completely different OS all together?

If I am wrong teach me o-wise internet user land. I am not afraid of being wrong as long as I learn from it.

Depends on what you're running. If your hardware stack is sufficiently standard and Linux compatible, you're fine. While Linux has gotten a lot better in a lot of areas, a handful of wireless chipsets, webcams, specialized gear (pro-grade audio interfaces, industrial control interfaces, etc.), and the advanced features of some multifunction printers sometimes elude a Linux setup. If none of these apply to you, then you're probably fine on the hardware front.

I usually use Linux, but occasionally I spin up a Win 7 vm when I need it. If you install using a SP1 disk, there are around 100 updates that need to be installed afterward. In my experience, this is comparable to the amount of updates needed after grabbing the latest Ubuntu LTS or a few month old Fedora release (Although Windows update can be slower that Apt or Yum).
Sure its not super convenient, but if you are installing Windows enough for it to be a problem, then you aren't doing your deployments correctly. You should really look into WSUS and WAIK for updating and deploying windows, respectively. They are both Microsoft products, but there are also numerous 3rd party tools of variable quality. A proper WAIK install can actually do the patching process during the install, so that when the computer logs in for the first time, it is fully patched.

They want you to think of Windows 8 as a replacement that is so good they need not have a sp2 for 7. They also want to give the impression they're stopping support for 7 so anyone who wants customer service will have to upgrade, which in the end all lends itself to profile.

Has decided that its out with the old and in with the new. Anyone opposing him is binned or sidelined. To underline the drive involved in Windows 8 - Windows 7 will quite quickly face a lock. If they can force you onto 8 thats where they will do so.

If he doesn't do this, the moment they will get on 8 will be minimised and he will look a private and public failure. And Mr Sinofsky doesn't like to be a failure.

It may questionably be good for windows users long term - as this might mean that the eco system has the earthquake required to shunt a billion trillion manhours of ecostructure from old win to new win.

Personally I think metro/notro is very poor. And it would take more than Sinofsky being a knob and a shitty UI to persuade people in the real world. Thus, looks rocky to me.

Its a shame, because to be blunt, 8 has some good engineering as does server 2012, utterly ruined by Sinofsky's insane LSD based unwindows, no windows allowed, ported from zune, but still broken beta UI. To rub your nose in it, they broke the old UI as well, and denied you the start bar and old desktop even if you like it. From now on its notro for you. Unless you go get classic shell and give sinofsky the finger.

What are the "good" engineering in Windows 8? You still can't delete opened/used files, you still can't open a file in multiple applications at the same time, chkfsk takes hours (compare that with fsck with takes seconds on 1.5TB RAID that I have). You still don't have a package manager, you still don't have anything useful in Windows pre-installed (like Python, Bash, Git, ssh, or a text editor (no notepad is a joke not a text editor)! No LVM support, no support for ext2/3/4 or btfs, no LUKS encryption. You

So instead of one big update they are releasing lots of small ones. As long as holes get patched in time I don't see how this affects end users. It's just a different patching schedule, a development-time decision which has little to do with the quality of the product.

Microsoft wants to shove Windows 8 (The Playskool OS) down everyone's throat, so they'll phase out Windows 7 as soon as they think they can get away with doing so. Step 1 in that process is not issuing a Service Pack 2.

Special security updates aside, whenever Apple updates the OS e.g. 10.7.2 to 10.7.3, it's essentially a service pack. Normally there's a combo updater that rolls up all updates for that major release so you could go from 10.x.0 to 10.x.4 (example only).

There are times when Apple's monolithic updates are a drawback, especially for traditional enterprise IT who might need to exclude certain updates, but here they have a clear advantage over Windows' hundreds of individual patches (sometimes requiring 2 or 3 Windows Update runs and restarts to get them all).

Microsoft hasn't done one of those since Windows 2000, but at one time they had a roll-up patch for 2K SP4 that incorporated all the updates released between the SP and the roll-up. I wish they'd re-institute the practice because it saves us desktop-support types a lot of time.

Maybe make a yearly roll-up so that I shouldn't have to install more than a few dozen updates at the most when I put our image on the computers. I've rolled my own image, but it's a bit of a pain to install updates.

Service packs are a pain for Microsoft, because they divert engineers’ time and budget from building new versions of Windows. In this case, the anticipation for Windows 7’s SP2 comes around the same time as the launch of Windows 8, out later this week. Also, by ending SPs, Microsoft could be pushing customers towards the completely new Windows 8.

Updated version of what? Windows isn't distributed as individual packages from desperate sources, it is developed as a single entity. The BSD's ship patches that you apply to local source and deploy from there for much the same reason.

Not that you couldn't change the development process to work that way (Solaris was a little more like this) but it is a non-trivial change to the workflow. It's not something that could be done on a whim.

And that's Linux's secret edge. Its developers are outlaws, lean and dangerous. We could do anything, anytime. We could fork your OpenOffice.org and call it LibreOffice... and then fork it right back. We could switch your default filesystem to btrfs, stone cold. We could drop X11 and replace it with Wayland... just like that.

AFAIK patches are optional. So MS will release a hotfix for something that only affects a small subset of users but they never push it to Windows Update and don't include it in automatic updates since most users won't need it and they don't want to deploy it since it'll just risk breaking already-working code for them.

I also think so, and I think that's one difference. I'm pretty sure MS patches are incremental.

Suppose patch B depends on patch A. In the Windows model, installing patch A is faster than the Linux model (ignoring all the other crap like system restore points that Windows does during updates to actually make it slower). The same is true of patch B when applied to a system with patch A: since MS only sends Windows users the things that need to change, it's smaller and faster to apply than under the Linux mode

Shouldn't the final patch of an EOL-ed product be its full source code? For example, what's preventing Microsoft from releasing the source code to Windows for Workgroups 3.11, oldish NT, or even up to Win2k? If people are still using these, Microsoft is sure as hell not getting one penny anymore from those users. So what harm would there be in releasing that old code base?